Artist Profile

Marion Michell

During the last ten years much of my art has touched on childhood, on growing up and its anxieties. It is as much an exploration of memory as of physical experience. Not necessarily concrete memories, more moods and atmospheres, interwoven with elements from myths and fairy tales. Crochet allows me to frame childhood memory in a very direct, tangible way. The quaintness of crochet, its look and sensory qualities, make a direct link to a lived (and imagined) past. My outfits skirt the border of reality as a way of thinking about bodies, bodies that buckle under the strain of difference, and draw their lifeblood from it. At the moment my work is concerned with inherited memory and how it affects us. This shift of focus comes with a widening of scope and media (from photography, collage, assemblage, stitching, crochet, to thread drawings, creation of heirlooms, etc.) through which I hope to expand and strengthen my visual language. My art-practice has become inseparable from my writing, through which I chart my processes, which in turn feeds back into the work. Please see my blog Sleep-drunk I dance on a-n Artists Talking.